“Brighter Day” came immediately to mind when I thought of a way to describe how I feel now.  The next thing that popped into my mind was soap opera.

We started early this year, sealing windows, plugging holes, and such.  We insulated places we’d never done before.  So it was alarming when the weather started turning cold and we could barely attain a 30 degree difference between indoors and out.    Ideally, we should be able to  have at least an 80 degree difference.  My tropical houseplants don’t like temps below 50°F (10°C), nor do I.  I keep my fridge at 40°F, and when the room temp drops lower than that, I whimper and bitch.  With the temp around freezing outside, it was merely uncomfortable in here.  The alarm arose from looking ahead to the sub-zero weather we knew was coming.  Thirty below zero is common, and fifty below is not unprecedented.

When it’s 50°F (10°C) at eye level where the thermometer is, our water jugs on the floor can freeze due to the colder drafts down there.  Jugs can be moved up onto tables and counters in that case, but if it drops below freezing at that level, plants die and water jugs freeze and burst.  Having had these things happen before, I don’t want to repeat the experience.  Last winter, our wood stove had done a satisfactory job, and I was at a loss to understand what was wrong this year.

One or the other of us, my son Doug or I, said every day or so, something like, “Why can’t we get this place warm? Is there a new hole in here?”  Then, one recent morning, I found the problem.  One of the big living room windows, the first one I had covered with poly sheeting this fall, was showing frost on the inside of the plastic sheet.  It wasn’t cold enough for that to happen, so I took a closer look.  The duct tape holding the bottom edge of the translucent window covering had come unstuck.  We had failed to see it earlier because a freestanding bookshelf stands below that window, its top edge even with the bottom of the window, obscuring the tape.

Doug was asleep and I didn’t want to waste time waiting for him to get up, so I got out the new roll of industrial strength duct tape, kicking myself for previously having bought a cheap roll of “utility grade” tape.  I took books off the shelves and moved 3 CD towers onto the floor.  That wooden bookcase is almost too heavy for me to move even when it is empty, but I did it, and I sealed the bottom edge of the Visqueen®.  The frost melted even before I’d moved the book shelf back into place, and I could feel the difference in the warmth of the room.

I think we’re ready for winter now, but we’re going to need to repair the roof again next summer, and Doug is going to have to shovel it promptly every time snow falls all winter.  There’s a new leak in the back room.

Thanksgiving is not, for me, a special occasion of thankfulness.  Every day, I cultivate an attitude of gratitude.  If you are impelled by that statement to admire me for my spirituality or condemn me for what you perceive as self-righteousness or pretentiousness, okay.  What you think of me is none of my business.  If you wish me ill, I forgive you.  If you wish me well, I appreciate it.  For me, gratitude and forgiveness are just two sides of the same choice, the choice to love and be happy, and that is a win-win situation.

There is as much selfishness as anything in this attitude.  I wasn’t taught gratitude or forgiveness by my family or culture as a child.  Slogans I learned included, “Don’t get mad; get even.”  I was also exposed to the slogan, “Forgive and forget,” but it was not reinforced by example.  My transgressions were not forgiven nor forgotten by my parents, my teachers, the criminal justice system, or my so-called friends.  Upon reflection, I think forgiving and forgetting  is a stupid idea, anyhow.  I’d much rather forgive and remember.  I’d rather not digress into an explanation of that, but you are welcome to let me know if you’d like to hear my rationale.

I learned to forgive, quickly and gratefully, those who hurt me, because not forgiving would just compound the hurt for me.  And, just in case there’s any confusion here, that, “gratefully” doesn’t mean I’m grateful for being hurt.  I’m grateful for the lessons that taught me forgiveness and the sweet relief I feel each time I forgive.  I didn’t learn those lessons easily.  I was hardheadedly attached to my righteous indignation for most of my life.

I had to have it spelled out for me, put into terms I could understand.  One of the most eloquent descriptions of resentment I ever heard was that it is like taking poison and hoping that the other guy dies.  Holding grudges was likened to trying to swim with an armful of rocks.  I listened to such things through numerous repetitions before I was willing to give it a try.  Like I said, I was really attached to my righteous indignation.  I had been hurt, and dammit, I was determined to resent it.

Then, after being bombarded with truth and wisdom over and over, I gave up, let go.  I chose love.  I’m thankful for that, thankful to all the people who made the effort to share their experience, forgiveness, hope and love with me, even when I was so unwilling to hear and heed it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

At this moment my radio is relaying a high wind warning effective from 3 this afternoon until 3 tomorrow morning.  It was about 3 this morning when wind noise woke me, with icy clumps of snow blown from trees smashing into my walls and windows.  There’s no more ice up in the trees now, but wind gusts occasionally cause the roof to bang, windows to rattle, and the aluminum ladder leaning against the side of the house to make an odd resonant sproingy sound.

The first light of dawn showed me a clear sky this morning, and I resolved to get out there and capture the sunrise on film pixels.  I looked up the sunrise time, set my kitchen timer, and when I got the 15 minute warning, put batteries in my camera.  It’s got a new peculiarity:  it runs down batteries even when it is turned off.  I work around that by removing batteries after each use, before I put it away.

I was wearing a lavender polar fleece vest over my black hooded sweatshirt (hood up over my blue bandanna) in the house, in a more or less futile attempt to achieve comfortable warmth.  With the wind sucking heat out of here, I’m about ready to change from my bluejeans and lightweight long johns into my merino wool underwear and polar fleece pants, or maybe the down-filled snow pants.  Get the picture?  C-O-L-D in here, and wind-chilly outside.  I put on my navy wind-proof parka, raised its hood over my hoody’s hood, put on a pair of Mylar glove liners (the warmest gloves I can wear and still operate my camera), and headed out the door.

The sun had not yet appeared when I captured the image below, of drifts along the road at the end of my driveway.

I left a set of tracks across that pristine drifted road and stomped my way through the berm on the other side, then out through the roadside trees onto the edge of the muskeg to get the shot below, of more drifted snow on the flat of what is marshland in different weather.

By the time the sun began to show itself over the treetops in the south-southeastern sky, my feet, fingers, and legs were cold and I couldn’t feel my nose or cheeks.  The hazy effect over that white strip along the base of the trees below is windblown snow.

Losing the feeling in my hands, I wimped out and turned back into the trees toward home, pausing a couple of times to snap pics of the rising sun as I retreated.

It wasn’t fully risen above the trees until after I’d gotten inside, shed my parka, removed the camera’s batteries and stuffed the camera itself into a plastic bag so it wouldn’t absorb moisture as it warmed to room temp.  It was a glorious sunrise, shedding golden light across the drifted snow and into my windows.  Sorry you had to miss that part of it.  Next time, I’ll try not to jump the gun that way.

Each Tuesday, all summer this year, a man named Larry would show up at the Felony Flats flea market with a load of stuff for sale at ridiculously low prices.  First time Greyfox mentioned him to me in one of our phone conversations, he was semi-ecstatic about the videos.  Larry was selling VHS for 25 cents and DVDs (plus the occasional Blu-Ray disk) for a dollar each.

He said he was selling out so he could move Outside (if you’re not from Alaska, you might not know that “Outside” means anywhere but here) and that he had several storage lockers to empty.  From the variety of items he was selling, and the fact that his huge stock of video included many duplicate titles, I inferred that he had probably bought some lots at auction, or else he’d been running a rental locker business and was liquidating abandoned items.

Greyfox bought tools, clothing, kitchen utensils, and various household items from Larry, but by far his most numerous purchases were videos.  Greyfox is a film fan and has a limitless need to be entertained.  His preferred genres are horror and sci-fi, both of which categories fall near the bottom of my own list of preferences. 

Early in our relationship, my darlin’ soulmate, spouse and partner in crime declared us to be the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of just about everything.  For example, back in the day, when I was getting loaded a lot, my drug of choice had been meth, while Greyfox never met a central nervous system depressant he didn’t like.

We don’t disagree on everything, of course.  In the entertainment realm, all three of us: Doug, Greyfox and I, are fans of George Carlin, many martial arts movies, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, and probably many other things we’ve not yet discovered.

But I digress.  Greyfox would occasionally call me while Larry was there and read a few titles that didn’t interest him over the phone so that I could say yea or nay to them, but it would have been cumbersome and time consuming to run through the hundreds of titles he had on hand on any given Tuesday, so the bags and boxes of video Greyfox acquired ran heavily toward his own tastes.

Doug and I got into Wasilla twice last summer while Larry was at the flea market.  Together, we bought well over a hundred titles of our own choosing, and have barely begun to view all of them, much less the even more numerous titles supplied by Greyfox.  My son and I both prefer interactive entertainment, so we watch far fewer movies than Greyfox does.  Greyfox also watches broadcast TV, while Doug and I use our TVs solely as monitors for game consoles and video playback.

I think that was another digression there.  My intention was to mention some highlights from our summer’s acquisitions.  Most outstanding was the first two seasons of House MD at a dollar each, which led to, first, the online purchase of a discounted two-pack of the third and fourth seasons, and finally to a full price DVD of the fifth season and Blu-Ray disk of the sixth season.  I’ll be buying the seventh season as soon as it’s available, too.  I’m hooked.

There have been several excellent animated movies we all enjoyed, including Over the Hedge, Meet the Robinsons, Ratatouille, and Monsters, Inc.  Incidentally and tangentially, several of my friends have told me that I am much like the character Remy from Ratatouille, and I’m still trying to figure out if they’re saying I’m a rat, a fine cook, good at pulling people’s strings, or what.

That was definitely a digression.  I’m also tempted to digress from the “Larry videos” to bring up an excellent TV series, and another mini-series we acquired elsewhere and enjoyed greatly:  The Lost Room and Firefly.  Firefly was part of the yard sale acquisitions after the neighbors from hell moved away, and Doug ordered The Lost Room on recommendations by his friends.    Among titles from Larry’s bounty this summer, some that we’ve all enjoyed included the Grindhouse duo from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and The Fast and the Furious:  Tokyo Drift.

Our latest biggest pleasure and surprise out of Larry’s stash is Bubba Ho-Tep, a genre bender and transcender, “redemptive Elvis mummy film.”  See it, if you haven’t.  You won’t regret it.

Maybe everyone who loses a lot of weight has thoughts like this:  catching sight of myself in a mirror, I was struck by how baggy my clothes are.  I would look like a waif, if the concepts “waif” and “crone” were not mutually exclusive.

I have set myself up to need to get some work done before I crash tonight.  My bed is covered with icy, snowy, dripping spruce boughs, laid out on a sheet over a waterproof layer of flattened feed sacks.  I fervently hope they will be dry enough to work into wreaths long before bedtime.  Meanwhile, I’m working on ribbons, cones, frames, etc., while they dry, and also occasionally sopping up the puddles on my bed lest they find a gap in the waterproof cover.

Loose ends from Thursday’s entry:  As I wrote and from time to time since then, I’ve reflected on my games-and-sports history.  One conclusion I reached is that I used to be a lot less interested in winning games than I was in pleasing people.  I got a lot of negative feedback for being a winner, and in my youth that really hurt.  Another insight involves the relative ease with which I could focus and apply myself to each of those new pursuits then.  It’s not that easy any more.

…oh, and probably a hypothesis or two.  I haven’t fully processed these memories and insights, haven’t concluded whether there is any deeper meaning to find here.

Primarily, this involves chess, archery and pool (billiards, not swimming or any other “pool”).  It has been years since I engaged in any of those activities.  Until recently, I hadn’t even recognized or considered the similarities between them for me.

In my childhood, I was very good at chess.  I concentrated intently, put a lot of effort into it, and won most of the time.  This wasn’t much different from other board games, or from card games, except in the amount of effort and concentration required to win.  At checkers, Chinese checkers, rummy, and other games, I won almost every time I played, but they didn’t require the amount of concentrated effort that chess did.  Kids didn’t like to play with me, and after one or two defeats, most adults refused ever to play with me again.  I was often accused of cheating.  That was ironic, because at the time I hadn’t even the vaguest idea how to cheat.

In my early twenties, working as a day shift bartender, when the bar was nearly deserted, after several occasions on which a customer asked me to shoot a game of pool with him and I responded that I didn’t know how to play, one of them offered to teach me.  Once I’d learned the fundamentals, I concentrated intently, put a lot of effort into it, and won most of the time — very nearly all the time.  Soon, the men I’d played started calling me a pool hustler and stopped asking me to play.  I didn’t mind.  Shooting pool was never fun for me:  too much effort and concentration involved.  It was more work than my job was, certainly.

In my early thirties, the man I was living with acquired a compound bow and taught me to shoot it.  After I’d mastered the fundamentals and developed the relevant muscles, I hit the mark almost every time, just as I had done when I learned to shoot a gun.  I enjoyed the activity of archery much more than firearms:  the quiet focus and seeing the flight of the arrows.    I never entered any archery competition.  I never went bowhunting.  I don’t enjoy killing animals.  If I needed to live off the land, I’d probably opt to snare hares or something for the protein, but I’d forage for most of my calories.

As I was writing the above, I recalled another, similar activity I’d engaged in and enjoyed:  throwing knives and shuriken.  I learned to throw knives after the pool shooting and before the archery.  The shuriken came later still, in my forties.  That was solitary activity, often indulged late on a summer night after Doug was asleep, out in the mosquitoes under the midnight sun.  A big slab of salvaged foam insulation was my backstop, and I had shredded it by the time I gained enough accuracy to hit the mark every time and lost interest in the sport.

As I said, I don’t know what conclusions to draw from all of this, if there are any.  I see connections, patterns, and I just realized that my craps shooting probably fits into these patterns somehow, too.  That’s all, for now.

On the way up to Sunshine to vote, as my new old rustbucket climbed the grade out of the Montana Creek gully, I laughed aloud and Doug grunted a query.  I said I’d been thinking of how to word a sign to hang on the back of the car to explain that I can drive just fine but the car isn’t capable of keeping up with traffic.  My first idea was just a simple banner saying, “rustbucket.”  I told Doug I could shorten it to “heap,” but that word is so old and obsolete almost nobody would get it.  We tried several ways of expressing the idea, eventually getting around to modifying some perennial bumper stickers.  I said, “My other car actually runs.”  Doug came up with, “I’d rather be driving.” 

Pretty lame in retrospect, but our little word game kept us laughing through the miles of slushy roadway and heavy snowfall.   We also got a few laughs out of the wipers, this being the first time in this car that we’ve needed to use them.  The knob on the dash has a setting for, “intermittent,” but the car’s idea of intermittent wipers is half a stroke and stop with the wiper in vertical position.  On the next bump, the wiper starts moving again, and doesn’t stop. 

The rubber shuddered and dragged noisily after the first stroke or two, and the knob is in an inconvenient position for a driver to operate without taking eyes off the road, so I assigned Doug the job of turning the wipers on when snow built up on my side, off when they got noisy.  He got distracted – no surprise there, he is always getting distracted – but at least voice commands:  “WIPERS!” were less hazardous than feeling and fumbling about for that knob.

On the way up we met a sand truck.  A snowplow was just ahead of us in the road when we turned off at the polling place.  Poll workers were commenting about the healthy turnout.  It is rare to ever encounter lines or waits in the Upper Su Valley, especially in a snowstorm.  Often for past elections, our car has been the only one in the parking lot at the fire hall.  Today there were half a dozen vehicles there when we arrived and at least that many different ones there as we were leaving.  It makes me wonder whether the hot issue for most of them is the bond proposition for schools and libraries (unlikely to pass, if history is any indication) or the crazy race for U.S. Senate.

Unless Joe Miller or Scott McAdams achieves a stunning majority (unlikely, I think), we probably won’t know until December, after all the write-in votes have been counted, whether we’ve got a new Senator, of if Lisa Murkowski has made history by winning a write-in vote.  The last I heard, legal types are still discussing whether Anchorage radio personality Dan Fagan’s attempt to thwart Lisa by offering prizes to people (especially those whose names are similar to Murkowski’s) for registering as write-in candidates, is a legal exercise of his First Amendment rights or some form of election tampering. 

It used to be that Alaska barely got a mention in national election news, what with our small population and the fact that often a presidential election had already been decided before our polls closed an hour after Californias.  Lately “little” Alaska has figured more largely in national politics than some of us appreciate.  Ah, well, at least we can provide the Lower 48 with a little comic relief.
 

I  had recognized our need for bunk beds several winters ago, after Doug started sleeping on the couch.  The sole source of heat in our home is the wood stove in our front room, a great room that comprises kitchen, office/workroom (formerly a dining area), and the living room, which is also a bedroom.  There was a bed in the front room when we moved in, and no bed in either of the two bedrooms. 

At first, Doug unrolled a sleeping bag in front of the fire.  After it became apparent that this house sitting gig had become a permanent residency, and a coffee table arrived to fill much of the floor space in here, we moved a futon from our old place at Elvenhurst across the highway, into the middle bedroom, and that became Doug’s room, but he slept there only in summer.

There are two good reasons for both of us to sleep in the great room in winter:  it is warmer, and there is almost twice the likelihood that the fire won’t go out.  I say “almost” twice because I am somewhat more likely than Doug is to wake up and tend the fire if it begins to cool off.  It’s only a problem when our sleep cycles coincide, anyhow.  Most of the time, our cycles don’t coincide, because he runs on a diurnal cycle of about 26 hours.

He is more than a foot taller than the couch is long, but he adjusted to it in various ways:  curling up, dangling off the edge, propping feet up on one arm, head on the other.  Eventually, after listening to his sleepy sounds of discomfort, I started waking him to move from the couch to the bed whenever I got up, or to move to the couch if he was in my bed when I was ready for sleep.  It was an awkward system, so I asked Greyfox to keep an eye out for a set of bunks.

Ideally, something would have shown up in a dumpster.  A thrift shop or yard sale would have been the second choice.  New furniture is simply beyond our budget.  He called me one day and said he’d found a pair of steel military style bunks for $160, but there were no mattresses.  He didn’t think they’d work out, but he thought he’d run it by me anyway.  I agreed:  we need mattresses, really.

And there the matter stood until last summer when two men moved into the cabin beside Greyfox’s at Felony Flats.  In warm weather, there is a flea market that materializes sometimes along the strip, up at the end in front of the old abandoned bar.  The first time these two guys loaded their disassembled bunkbed in and onto their compact car, hauled it to the corner and set it up to sell, Greyfox called me.  He said it looked pretty good to him, and had mattresses, but they wanted $550 for it.  We agreed that this was a bit steep for our means.

I don’t know how many times they set it up and took it down before they started lowering the price.  I do recall several times when Greyfox related humorous stories about watching their tribulations transporting and assembling it.  When the price started going down, Greyfox and I started developing a proprietary attitude toward that bed.  Once, when they left it out in the rain, Greyfox helpfully went over and covered it with a tarp for them.

I think the price had gotten down as low as $175 the day that Greyfox went over to their place after they’d taken it apart and hauled it home, and negotiated it down to $100.  The guys moved the pieces of the bed frame onto Greyfox’s porch, helped him stow the mattresses in his storage shed, and handed him a Minute Maid frozen concentrated orange juice can full of “hardware.”  There it stood for days and daze (a couple of weeks, maybe), until my next town trip.

Doug went along to help me load things.  It was raining.  That almost goes without saying.  Throughout the summer of 2010, it rained.  I remember 3 sunny days all summer.  The bed apparently had been put together by an amateur (two amateurs, I later learned) in a home workshop, but I wasn’t really worried until Greyfox handed me the can of “hardware.”  It consisted of a handful of half-inch wood screws.  I imagined an earthquake, or maybe just a restless night on my top bunk, and my beloved Kid being squashed when the bed fell apart.

Anyhow, we got all the pieces of the frame into the hatch of my ’87 Subaru wagon, Blur, and Greyfox gave us a big sheet of black poly to cover the part of it that stuck out the back.  Doug tied a red bandanna on the tail end of it, and we headed home.  That was the trip on which we lost our exhaust system going through the road construction area, or maybe it was the next trip.  We transferred the bed into the storage cabin and wrapped the black poly around it (Doug said it looked like the monolith from 2001) so that when our tomcats got into their inevitable pissing contest over whose territory it was, the bed would still be mine.  This was before I got that storage cabin cleared out enough so that we could shut the door.

Several weeks later, on our way home from the laundromat, we brought the mattresses with us, leaving them in the car to keep the cats away from them.  We had been working on clearing furniture out of the way of the new bed, and I’d made enough space on the floor of a back room to lay out a sleeping bag in case it took more than a day to put the new bunk together.  Finally, one day, we took the old bed apart, moved it out by the wood pile, covered it with a tarp (sold it later for $20), and started putting the bunk together.  We had thought we were going to need to do some drilling and bolting for security, but as we looked it over we discovered that there were some bolts in that can with the screws, and some sturdy brackets already bolted to the boards.

In the assembly process, we had to stop halfway through to make a quick trip up to Moore’s Hardware for a missing bolt and two nuts.  It all went together in a few hours, but it was far from simple or easy.  Once again, as many times before, I had occasion to be glad of the high IQs in our family.  There was no diagram, the scrawled markings didn’t match, and there were holes that did not match up, like a tab here that was supposed to go into a slot here, but the slot was way-the-hell over there. 

When I told Greyfox that Doug and I had finally concluded that there had once been two sets of bunks and we had gotten pieces of both sets, he said that the guys had once mentioned to him that they had originally had two bunkbeds.  Nobody mentioned what happened to the other one, and that’s irrelevant, anyhow.  I appreciate my new bed.  It has a rustic look I like — 3 drawers underneath have rope handles and the whole thing is glued together apparently out of scrap lumber.  If it was cloth, it would be patchwork; if stone, mosaic.  The mattresses are foam blocks resting on plywood platforms, good support and fine comfort.

No ladder came with it.  Access to my top bunk is from the top of my bedside table, which I reach by first climbing onto a milk crate.  The bedside table blocks access to one of the drawers, and that one is filled with quilts that are big enough for a queen-size bed, of no use to us in this house, but too good to get rid of.  Another side table, on which rests a rope-handled wooden chest containing much of my rock collection, blocks access to the drawer at the foot.  Those are my clothes in there, and when I want them, I move the rocks and the table — no big deal.  Doug’s clothes are in the accessible drawer in the middle.

This photo was taken months ago, before I had gotten my library sorted and shelved.  Books are piled everywhere, including on and around the rock chest.  Koji is partially visible in the sunbeams behind that chest, on Doug’s bed.  Granny Mousebreath (still missing at this writing) snoozes on the windowsill.  The objects topped with large cushions in the right foreground are what we call, for want of a better term, the “mushrooms,” because their tops are bigger than the supporting objects.  The far one is atop a bookcase that parallels the foot of the bed.  The near one rests on a stack of two suitcases full of my surplus clothing.  In the aggregate, the musrooms are simply cat furniture.  Our cats enjoy basking in the heat of the woodstove (which stands in the approximate POV of this shot), watching the flames.

Okay, that’s the story of the bed.  Gotta go now and check the fire.  Doug has been asleep in the bottom bunk since about 10:00 AM.  He stayed awake as long as he could this morning so that we will have time to go up to Sunshine tomorrow after I get up, before he goes to sleep, to vote, and do a little shopping at Cubby’s and Moore’s.